How to get better at skiing, rung by rung

What better means: nine rungs, three forms each

Swiss ski schools do not grade skiers by the colour of the piste they survive. They grade them by forms. The Swiss Snow League, the national curriculum of Swiss Snowsports, which licenses 169 ski schools, counts about 8,000 members teaching and, by its umbrella body’s reckoning, sells more than six million lessons a winter, is a ladder of nine rungs: the Kids Village, then Blue Prince or Princess, King or Queen and Star, the same three in the Red League, then Academy Rookie and the Swiss Snow Academy, where a skier picks race, freestyle or freeride. Each rung has three “I can” forms, and a rung counts as done only when all three are shown: a Red King who can carve but cannot land a small jump is still a Red King. The Swiss Ski and Snowboard School in Klosters publishes the whole list, and the figure above follows it. Older brochures called the top rungs the Black League; Swiss Snowsports is reworking the league for the 2026/27 winter, keeping the structure, as its project page puts it, while making lessons more experience-based.

The ladder was built for children, who collect a medal and a booklet entry per rung, but nothing in it is childish, and the honest placing of an adult is the whole trick. Can you side-slip on demand, stop with skis parallel from speed, ski a red in short turns, land a jump? Then you are a Red King, and the next rung is not a steeper piste but a one-ski turn and a switch snowplough. Arosa’s school runs adult groups under the same names; Zermatt’s uses First Try, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced, three days from CHF 370 in groups of three to six. The bfu, Switzerland’s accident-prevention agency, puts self-overestimation beside speed and worn equipment among the main causes of the roughly 62,000 injuries a year on Swiss pistes. The ladder is a cure for it: a form is either there or it is not.

The plateau is a measurement problem

Instructors everywhere describe the same stall. The New Zealand instructors’ association puts it at about level four of its scale, the first comfortable parallel turn, and blames five things: fitness, too few days on skis, long gaps between them, movement patterns that have set like plaster, and fear. A Swiss skier has little time to fight any of them. The 88 million hours Sport Schweiz 2020 counted, spread over the 3 million residents the bfu says ski at least occasionally, come to about 29 hours a year each: 6 days of five hours, by Skiboard’s arithmetic. That is enough to keep a habit and not enough to change one.

The research on practice is less flattering than the folklore. Anders Ericsson’s studies of violinists gave the world the ten-thousand-hour rule; a 2014 meta-analysis of 88 studies by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald found that deliberate practice explains about 18% of the variance in sports performance, 21% in music, under 1% in the professions. The authors called it important, but not nearly as important as its proponents claim. For a skier the reading is practical rather than discouraging: the kind of practice matters more than the quantity, and the kind that works is specific, uncomfortable and corrected. Skiing the same red the same way for six days a year is exercise, not practice.

Buy feedback, not skis

The cheapest feedback is an instructor, and adults buy surprisingly little of it. A 2019 survey for the insurer InsureandGo found that more than half of British skiers had never taken a lesson; 8% said they could not be bothered. Iglu Ski, the biggest agent in the same market, found in 2024 that 60% of its customers had started skiing after twenty, so the habit of being taught was never formed. In Switzerland the obstacle is rarely price: a three-day adult group course in Zermatt starts at CHF 370, less than the lift pass for the same days. The case for buying anyway is in the accident figures. In a Norwegian case-control study of injured skiers and snowboarders, beginners carried 2.7 times the odds of injury of everyone else, and more than 90% of accidents on Swiss pistes are solo falls with nobody else involved. The same Norwegian data found that lessons did not change the overall odds, which is worth knowing: a lesson is bought for the form, not as a talisman.

What a good lesson does is change where your attention goes. In 1998 Gabriele Wulf, Markus Höß and Wolfgang Prinz put novices on a ski simulator and told some to push on their outer foot and others to push on the outer wheels of the platform. The wheel group learnt faster and swung wider; the foot group did no better than people given no instruction at all. A quarter-century of follow-ups has made the “external focus” the best-supported finding in motor learning: aim at the snow, the edge, the pole tip, the end of the turn, not at your knee. A later study found the effect fades for skilled junior racers, which is the point: the cue has to fit the rung. The other thing a lesson provides is sight. Nobody sees their own skiing, and the small controlled trials on video in ski instruction agree that watching yourself with an instructor’s correction beats either on its own.

Technology now sells the same two things by subscription. Carv clips a sensor to each boot and scores every turn on a scale it calls Ski:IQ, on which the average skier sits at 100 and whose model, the company says, was trained on about 500 million turns. GearJunkie’s reviewer, after thirteen days with it, gave it 9 out of 10 and said its real effect was to train his attention onto the weakest part of his technique, at USD 250 a year against USD 1,650 for a private day in Vail. The numbers are the company’s own, and no independent study has checked them. The mechanism, though, is exactly what the simulator study found: a cue outside the body, and a number that moves.

Choose the slope that teaches

The colours on a Swiss piste map are the operator’s judgement, not a measurement, and they vary more than skiers assume. Skiboard measured the 3,081 pistes OpenStreetMap maps in 285 Swiss areas on swisstopo’s two-metre terrain model, taking the steepest 100 m of each. Half of Switzerland’s blues have a steepest stretch under 28%, half its reds under 38%, half its blacks under 51%; a third of the blacks stay under 46%, within reach of a strong Red Star. Between areas the spread is wider than between colours. A typical blue in Unterbäch tops out near 13%, in Sarn Heinzenberg near 36%, steeper than many reds; a typical black in Saint-Luc reaches 33%, in Sörenberg 65%. For a skier working on a form, that is the number to choose a mountain by: the Blue League wants wide, gentle blues, the Red King wants reds that are typical rather than the area’s show-piece, and the Academy Rookie wants black kilometres rather than one famous wall.

There is also simply less mountain the higher you climb. Across the 215 areas whose mapped runs carry a difficulty, 45% of the 4,967 kilometres are blue, 42% red and 11% black; ski routes, the yellow unmarked descents, are 3%. A skier who completes the Red League can use nearly nine-tenths of what Switzerland pistes. The table above picks, for each rung, the areas with the most kilometres of the right colour, and for the Blue League only areas whose blues measure gentler than most; 12 areas in all, each listed once, and areas whose pistes cross the border left out because only their Swiss side is measured.

Legs before technique

The forms on the ladder are mostly legs. The bfu counts about three injuries per 1,000 skier days on Swiss pistes, 62,000 a year, four in five of them light, 15% keeping someone off work for a month and 6% for three. The knee takes 39% of skiing injuries in the piste-rescue statistics, and the injured are getting older: Suva, the national accident insurer, says the 40-to-64-year-olds’ share of its ski and snowboard claims rose from 39% in 2003 to 56% in 2023. Samuli Aegerter, who runs Suva’s winter campaign, puts the fix in one sentence: judge your form of the day, your fitness and your skills correctly.

Two experiments show how much is trainable. In the 1993/94 season Carl Ettlinger, Robert Johnson and Jasper Shealy taught the on-slope staff of twenty American ski areas to recognise, on video, the body positions in which skiers tear a cruciate ligament; serious knee sprains among the trained patrollers and instructors fell 62% against the two previous seasons, with no change at areas that were not trained. In Sweden, Maria Westin and colleagues gave 305 ski-school racers a video and six exercises aimed at doing everything equally well on both legs; over two seasons their ACL injury rate was 45% lower than in the five seasons before, a result that only just reached significance. Neither was a trial on recreational skiers. Both say what the ladder says: a specific thing, practised, moves a number. The bfu adds the two unglamorous habits: a binding set and tested by a shop before the season, and edges that are neither blunt nor burred.